Spider's Rigging

Regarded by some researchers as a technology, by others as a game and by others still as a traditional folk art, Spider's Rigging is, by any label, a popular pastime among children, and more specifically girls, in the Eleven Cities. Ostensibly simple, the practice involves taking lengths or tied loops of string (or plaited sections of one's own hair) and twining it around and between the fingers of one or both hands in order to form shapes and knots. Skilled practitioners can carefully rest curves in the string around knuckles or bend the string around itself to create plaited shapes or, by changing the position of the fingers, animate the shapes they create. Some have been known to make something of a seated dance of the practice, with the kinetic process of creating the shape becoming a performance as intriguing as the final shape. The shapes themselves tend to be abstract rather than figurative, though the general notion is that they vaguely recall those found in a spider's web, hence the name.
Spider's Rigging enjoys sporadic vogues in villages across the Alluvial plain and in most the Eleven Cities, particularly the southern cities of Pholyos, Loros, Chogyos and Ramoros. Unless plaited from the practitioner's own hair, the strings involved are traditionally coloured white or pale grey; in some rural communities small wooden or amber beads are strung on the strings or, if the practitioner really knows what she is doing, juggled between and across them.
The gendered nature of this activity is worth emphasising. Almost everywhere it is practised it is seen as an appropriate activity for young girls, who are expected to amuse themselves in this way periodically until roughly the time they reach marriageable ages. Adult women and men who indulge in this practice tend to be seen as immature or silly, particularly in urban areas.
The origin of the practice is not clear but it goes back some considerable distance into the pre-Wesmodian era, which makes it of interest to thaumatologists, some of whom attribute it with thaumaturgical significance. This may not be wholly fanciful. Spiders are, alongside owls and cats, among the animals linked to the worship of Maryas, the pre-Wesmodian goddess of secrets and enigmas. Although Maryas's pre-Wesmodian clerics included both men and women, the popular worship of the goddess was at least seen as a predominantly female affair, and the mythology surrounding her is full of uniformly female figures possessed of some degree of thaumaturgic skill. Several such figures, including Zyallssan, Tassa of Andymalon and Ysphylas in the story of The Mottled Keys of Ysphylas, are described as practising Spider's Rigging at various points in some versions of their stories. Post-Wesmodian representations of the goddess suggest she herself could perform Spider's Rigging with superhuman skill, though whether this projection of post-Wesmodian sensibilities onto this pre-Wesmodian figure has any basis in historical fact is a valid question. 
Nevertheless, with the worship of Maryas so notoriously difficult to research, it has been proposed that studying the patterns of Spider's Rigging - both those created in the course of the game and those potentially evident in the ebb and flow of the practice in various communities - might be approached in something of the same way that folklorists study the worship of Zargyod by analysing the history of songs and dances among the Sailors on the Sea of Jars. As yet no published research in this field exists; given how few thaumatologists are willing to commit to the study of this oddest of pre-Wesmodian gods, this may or may not change soon.